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Ant-Man and the Wasp utilises the latest in visual effects tech to bring its story to the big screen. But some of the most fun shots in the film also have some of the most low-tech effects solutions.

These are where Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) visits his daughter’s school with Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) to retrieve a hidden suit. Ant-Man’s new suit is malfunctioning, causing him to grow or shrink unexpectedly. At one point he has to hide in a broom cupboard now too small to hold him, and later he and Wasp appear in the same room passing a bag between them with Ant-Man only half-size. Finally, Ant-Man has to climb down some normal sized steps but at his now half-height.

There’s so much to take in at SIGGRAPH these days, but a couple of events are becoming absolute ‘must-sees’. One of those is Real-Time Live! which is an evening of on-stage presentations of real-time tech – ie. it’s live, and anything can happen.

In Ant-Man and the Wasp, a new character introduced in the film is Ava Starr, aka Ghost, played by Hannah John-Kamen. An accident has caused Starr to suffer from molecular instability, giving her the ability to phase through objects. She uses these powers against the film’s heroes in the hope of finding a cure through their quantum research.

It’s basically psychotic. It doesn’t have a mother. It has no sense of right or wrong and it’s a bit unhinged. – Alex Wuttke, visual effects supervisor, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

The genetically engineered Indoraptor is a new kind of dinosaur introduced in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. For the film’s effects teams, it was the opportunity to explore different creature behaviours, motion and emotion, particularly because ‘Indo’ was, as a result of his creation, somewhat of a neurotic dinosaur.

For on set, Neal Scanlan’s team built and puppeteered practical Indo pieces, while in CG, ILM worked on introducing twitches to the mentally unstable dino, which also had to have the ability to go from a biped to a quadruped. vfxblog sat down with ILM visual effects supervisors David Vickery and Alex Wuttke and animation supervisor Jance Rubinchik to talk through how they ‘found’ their Indoraptor character. Continue reading Finding ‘Indo’ – how ILM made Fallen Kingdom’s Indoraptor a different dinosaur

The sight of a brachiosaurus being enveloped in an ash cloud after the volcanic eruption of Isla Nublar – as several characters and other dinosaurs leave the island by boat – was a powerful moment in J.A. Bayona’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. vfxblog asked ILM animation supervisor Jance Rubinchik about the approach to that touching scene, which turned out to be a direct reference back to the original Jurassic Park.

Jance Rubinchik: Wherever we could pay any sort of homage to Jurassic Park, we did. It was always fun when we got the opportunity to. In that shot, you see brachi labouring down the pier towards the end as the ash cloud is racing towards her. She rears up and her head comes up just as the smoke is enveloping her. We lose her and we see her shadow through the smoke.

We basically lifted that moment from the original Jurassic Park where the first dinosaur we see is the brachiosaur riding up on her back two legs and plucking the leaves from the tops of the branches. That’s the first time that as an audience we get to see a dinosaur. So I thought it was great that the last time we see a dinosaur on Isla Nublar is taking it full circle back to brachi and we see her doing a very similar action – coming up back on those back hind legs.

Original plate.Final shot.

When we had originally animated it, we were blocking it in and we had those ash clouds more behind the brachi. You’ve got that full moment of her coming up onto two legs and then the ash cloud sort of moved past her. So you kind of got that moment a lot more. J.A. wanted to be less obvious, he wanted more of that moment of the shadow projected through the smoke. So the effects guys just kept adding more smoke and more smoke and more smoke, until it got fairly covered up in the end.

Which was – it’s always a little disappointing on the animators side, when you do all this work and then it’s a little bit lost or obscure. But in the end, it’s all about what makes the story work and what has the most visual impact. I think J.A. was absolutely right in that call. It just really tugs at the heartstrings even more so.

Stay tuned to vfxblog.com for more Fallen Kingdom articles during #jurassicweek Mark II.

The final scenes of Fallen Kingdom, in which several dinos have escaped captivity and are now out in the ‘human world’, hint at exciting times to come. Two moments in particular stand-out: the sight of a giant Mosasaurus coming through a wave amidst a group of surfers, and a T. Rex roaring at a lion in a zoo.

“We gave Neal a 200 million polygon file from the T. rex at one-to-one scale. He started printing it but two days later he rang me panicking, going, ‘David, David. I can see poly faces! I can see the polygons in my 3D print! We need more resolution!’” – David Vickery, visual effects supervisor, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

At one point in J.A. Bayona’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the characters Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Owen (Chris Pratt) find themselves in a shipping container with a groggy T. rex…which then wakes up.

It’s a thrilling scene, thanks to the close-quarters action, and one that involved a close collaboration between Neal Scanlan’s practical creatures and ILM’s digital visual effects, overseen by supervisors David Vickery and Alex Wuttke. That collaboration included the provision of digital models early on from ILM to Scanlan so that the practical and CG dinos would match as tightly as possible.

In my book, Masters of FX, I profiled 16 visual and special effects supervisors about their bodies of work. One of those was Ian Hunter, who, through Hunter/Gratzner Industries and New Deal Studios, has contributed a wealth of practical, miniature, and other effects work for large scale films and other projects.

Hunter supervised the miniature explosion of the federal building in The X-Files Movie, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this week. Back in 1998, the film featured a mix of practical and digital effects work, but the building explosion and subsequent partial collapse – which happens very early on – was easily the most spectacular scene.

Felix & Paul Studios is behind the ‘Jurassic World: Blue‘ VR mini-series available on Oculus Go, Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR headsets. They worked with ILM on the experience, and here’s a neat featurette on how the mocap was achieved. Look for ILM’s awesome animation supe Glen McIntosh!

I recently got to chat to Solo visual effects supervisor Rob Bredow about the film – you should be able to read various articles around the place, and I’ll post links to them at vfxblog.com. One of the standout sequences in the film is the conveyex train heist on Vandor, and Bredow shared his scouting, shooting, and miniature explosions process for bringing that incredible sequence to life. Check it out at the link below:

How closely were you watching that game of Dejarik in Solo? Now’s the time to take another look…

Pretty much every Star Wars film has fun Easter Eggs. But Ron Howard’s Solo has one of the coolest ‘inside visual effects’ hidden gem played out so far. And it’s to do with the game of Dejarik – or Holochess – that Chewbacca and Tobias Beckett play on the Millennium Falcon (which is at this stage owned by Lando Calrissian).

Holochess should be something that most avid Star Wars-watchers are familiar with. It showed up first in A New Hope, where Phil Tippett and Jon Berg animated stop-motion creatures that were composited as holograms into a scene of Chewbacca playing the game against R2-D2. A brief refrain of the game appeared in The Force Awakens, too. Then, in Solo, Chewbacca loses at the hands of Beckett.

But…something pretty cool happens during that most recent incarnation in Solo.

Let’s start with the actual clip from the film.

Did you see it? Watch it again and look what happens when Chewie gets frustrated and slams and wipes the board with his arm.

That’s right, two of the creatures actually ‘pop off’ as holograms, presumably because Chewie uses his Wookie strength to almost break the Holochess table.

Both the ‘new’ chess pieces are there (look above the second light from the left on the table).Chewie goes nuts.After the table sparks, the pieces have now ‘popped’ off. You can see the gap left on the board.

‘Big deal,’ I hear you say. Well, it’s actually a completely intentional thing. That’s because those two creatures that pop off the board were actually two creatures originally intended to be in the game during A New Hope.

Wait, what?

Well, here’s what happened, as described by Solo visual effects supervisor Rob Bredow at a recent Visual Effects Society screening and Q&A of the film.

The story was, Tippett had originally built 10 more characters, two more than he needed. Apparently George Lucas came out when they were lining up the shots for A New Hope 41 years ago and he said, ‘Oh it’s too crowded.’ So Tippett took a couple of them off the board and they were never seen again.

But…those pieces were not actually lost forever. Relatively recently, Tippett did find the original designs to the two creatures. What’s more, it turned out he’d given the unused stop-motion models to ILM visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren after A New Hope wrapped. And Muren had kept them, all these years.

Just to be sure, watch this clip from A New Hope, which shows just eight characters on the table.

The discovery of the two missing creatures seems to have happened as Tippett was simultaneously cleaning out his studio and preparing rewards for a Kickstarter for his short film project MAD GOD. His studio accessed the original models, scanned them via photogrammetry and moulded new versions for the rewards.

In fact, that Kickstarter project was all documented last year in a video for Tested, which showed how the new moulds were made and the figures crafted for awards.

Jump to production on Solo, and Tippett Studio – which had already re-made the original eight Holochess characters for a brief scene of Finn activating the table in The Force Awakens – was called upon to make this new Dejarik game between Chewie and Beckett.

That spurned the idea, as a story point, that perhaps there were originally ten creatures to the game on Lando’s Falcon, until Chewie’s meltdown.

Bredow related further on this at the VES event:

Tippett said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if the pristine Lando Falcon has two extra characters on the board?’ And then we realised when Chewie does this [mimes hand thumping], two of the buttons popped off the table. If you watch carefully…two extra characters for two shots. Then they disappear, never to be seen again.

Which just goes to show, it really is unwise to upset a Wookie.

A pic of one of the original missing chess pieces (from the Tested video).A pic of the other missing chess piece (from the Tested video).Tippett with the collection of chess pieces during A New Hope (one of the missing pieces is identified). This pic from the Kickstarter for MAD GOD Part 3.

vfxblog’s Jurassic Week coverage continues with this look at a few innovations introduced by ILM in Jurassic World; an iPad app for visualising the dinos during on-set photography, and a workflow for motion capturing raptors and the scariest dinosaur so far. Check it out below.

Jurassic Week continues with this in-depth look at the several tech breakthroughs made by ILM in Jurassic Park III, including with ambient occlusion, virtual sets, flesh sims and simulated plants. Read the dedicated page, below.

A lot of crazy stuff happens in Deadpool 2. A lot. But perhaps nothing quite matches the ‘baby legs’ moment. It’s when Wade Wilson aka Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) is stuck on the couch of his elderly blind roommate Blind Al (Leslie Uggams) while his legs re-generate, having been earlier torn in half by Juggernaut (oh yeah, that was pretty crazy, too).

We first see the stumpy legs – and possibly more – as Wilson sits. Then, Cable (Josh Brolin) arrives and Wade shuffles up to him, baby-walk style. To pull off the legs gag, director David Leitch entrusted production visual effects supervisor Dan Glass and VFX studio Double Negative to work their magic. vfxblog asked Glass to describe how those shots were made. Continue reading Deadpool 2’s what the…!? scene and how it was made

Next up in vfxblog’s Jurassic Week is a brand new oral history on the making of the Dinosaur Input Device. It was this dinosaur-shaped stop-motion armature fitted with special encoders that kept Tippett Studio in the game during the making of Jurassic Park, after its original stop-motion dinos were scrapped in favour of ILM’s CG. This oral history includes a ton of rarely seen behind the scenes images.

I was lucky enough to score a ticket last night to see James Cameron speak in Sydney. It was at a Vivid event, a festival here famous for lighting up city landmarks and for presentations on culture, new ideas and art and technology.

Cameron shared his journey on all sorts of things, mostly related to his deep sea expeditions and environmental causes. He was incredibly engaging the whole time and managed to pass on a few key insights into his past, recent and upcoming filmmaking adventures (yes, he mentioned the Avatar sequels A LOT).

In vfxblog’s ‘Man-in-suit, miniatures, mechanics and modern CG: looking back at 20 years since Godzilla’, we chat to visual effects supervisor Volker Engel about this massive 1998 release and its use of practical, miniature, animatronics, puppet and CGI effects – all at once. The Q&A has some fun new facts about the teaser trailer for the film, and about how a whole bunch of shots were done, including one of my favourites, the fisherman running along that pier. You can check it all out at this dedicated link:

Are you a filmmaker? The 2018 VIEW Conference is now accepting submissions for its 2018 film competitions.

There’s a €2,000 first prize – the VIEW Award – for short animated film, and the ITALIANMIX award for Italian short films.

Here’s some more info on how to enter:

– The VIEW AWARD is open to professionals and students, individuals or groups. Entries must be 2D or 3D animated films of 30 minutes or less created after January 1, 2016. An international jury drawn from the VIEW conference speaker roster will award the prize.

– The ITALIANMIX award is open to Italian artists working individually or with a group. Animated, experimental, or documentary films of 30 minutes or less created after January 1, 2016 are accepted. The winner will receive a Wacom tablet.

– Any dialog in the films must be in English or Italian, or have subtitles in English or Italian. Each submission should come with a press kit, a description of the project, high res still images of the work, and director credits. There is a €10 fee to enter.

20 years ago, the first of 1998’s asteroid films, Deep Impact, was released. In some ways it used visual effects rather sparingly to showcase the result of a partial meteor hit on the Earth. Massive waves hitting New York were a feature of the film, and these were realised as CG water sims by ILM. One shot in particular stayed in my memory – an overhead view of the waves crashing between buildings. Christopher Horvath was behind the sims for that shot, and he spoke to vfxblog about how it was made two decades ago. Read the interview here: http://vfxblog.com/deepimpact/